Puppet MastersS


Briefcase

50 Shades of Greece

Raúl Ilargi Meijer
The Automatic Earth
Sun, 22 Feb 2015 18:06 UTC
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© John M. FoxWindow display of imported and domestic cheeses, New York 1948.
When it comes to the ongoing Greek question, I see a lot of people eagerly jump to conclusions, after the 'debt deal', that I don't think are justified; certainly not yet. The overall conviction in the press seems to be that Syriza has given in on just about all fronts, and Germany and Dijsselbloem are the big winners.

But since that may well be the exact position Syriza wants 'the other side' to be in, where they think they have prevailed, one will have to try and think a few steps ahead before judging the situation. There's far more grey area here than many pundits seem to assume, easily 50 shades of it.

If Greece wouldn't have given Germany the idea that it was winning, Athens would have already come very close to an exit from the eurozone. The problem with that is that it is not part of the mandate Syriza has been given by Greek voters. Who have spoken out for an end to austerity, but within the existing euro framework.

Comment: This Grexit will be interesting to watch in the coming weeks.

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USA

Foiled coup in Venezuela timed with Opposition leaders' call for regime change

Lucas Koerner
venezuelanalysis.com
Mon, 16 Feb 2015 15:52 UTC
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A 'Super Tucano': Was the US plotting 'tactical strikes' in order to destroy the Venezuelan govt?
New revelations in Venezuela have linked U.S. private security firm Blackwater, now known as Academi, to the aircraft that was to be used as part of Thursday's thwarted "Blue Coup" attempt.

The four-stage plan included economic war, an international media offensive against the Venezuelan government, political destabilization fomenting ungovernability, and finally the use of a Super Tucano aircraft to strike "tactical targets" in the capital, such as the Presidential Palace, teleSur, and military intelligence.

The coup was planned for the one-year anniversary of violent opposition protests known as the Guarimba and was to come one day after a public statement by leading opposition leaders calling for a "transition".

According to U.S. aviation records, the EMB-314B1 or "Super Tucano" aircraft in question was acquired from Brazilian manufacturer Embraer by the firm Blackwater Worldwide in 2008 allegedly for the purpose of pilot training. Registered under the serial number N314TG, the aircraft is, moreover, the only one of its kind sold by the Brazilian firm to a private company.
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Nuke

Fresh Fukushima nuclear leak 70 times greater detected at plant


i24news.tv
Sun, 22 Feb 2015 14:42 UTC
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© Kimimasa Mayama (Pool/AFP/FileA TEPCO employee measures radiation levels as workers construct an ice wall at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture on July 9, 2014.
Radiation levels at the tsunami-hit plant measured 50 to 70 times greater than usual.

Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water to the sea, the plant's operator announced Sunday, highlighting difficulties in decommissioning the crippled plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus.

TEPCO said its emergency inspections of tanks storing nuclear waste water did not find any additional abnormalities, but the firm said it shut the gutter to prevent radioactive water from going into the Pacific Ocean.

Comment: It seems TEPCO doesn't have a clue of what is going on or how to contain the radioactive leaks. This is an ongoing disaster for the world.

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Bad Guys

The Department of Homeland Security is a total disaster - It's time to abolish it

Dara Lind
Vox
Tue, 17 Feb 2015 00:00 UTC
DHS
© Saul Loeb/AFP
If Congress doesn't act before February 27, the Department of Homeland Security is going to run out of money and go into a partial shutdown. (Eighty-five percent of employees would still be working, but they wouldn't be getting paid.) Congress doesn't appear to have a plan for action; as of last week, before it broke for recess, House and Senate lawmakers were each telling each other to do something. Meanwhile, politicians in both parties have already skipped to the step where they blame the other party for the possible shutdown — making them seem pretty resigned to it happening. House Speaker John Boehner said on Sunday he's "certainly" ready for a DHS shutdown.

Comment: DHS is an organization that was created in the wake of 911 (an inside job), and consumes $60 billion tax payer money every year. There is no reason whatsoever to keep it going, other than to terrorize the American population.

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War Whore

Poroshenko's cowardice betrayed the Ukrainian Army in Debaltseve

Alexander Mercouris
Sputnik News
Fri, 20 Feb 2015 00:31 UTC
soldier Debaltseve
© Sputnik/Dan Levy
In reality President Poroshenko sacrificed Ukrainian soldiers because he did not want to incur the wrath of the war party in Kiev by ordering their retreat.

Control of Debaltseve was important to the east Ukrainian militia. As a key railway junction it interfered with communications between the two rebel republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. It was also an obvious launch pad for a new government offensive aimed at cutting the militia controlled areas off from each other.

It is impossible to see how Debalsteve was comparably important to the Ukrainian government. The very things that made Debaltseve important to the militia guaranteed that in the event of renewed fighting the militia would aim to capture it. A glance at the map shows why in that event, given the balance of forces, it was indefensible.

So it proved. By Monday 9th February 2015, even Western journalists were admitting the militia had encircled Debaltseve and the Ukrainian troops there were cut off. The Ukrainian government however denied it.

The denial reached farcical levels during the negotiations in Minsk. Half the 16 hours of negotiations were reportedly taken up with attempts to get Ukraine's President Poroshenko to admit the obvious, that his troops in Debaltseve were encircled. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko refused to do so, refusing to order his troops to retreat and rejecting all offers from others to arrange this.

Comment: The Right Sector party is insane and wants the war to continue to produce a "pure Ukraine". That's code for genocide of the Russian inhabitants of Ukraine. They have likely threatened him serious harm if he goes against their wishes. The IMF won't give any more loans with which he can continue the war, until Porchenko agrees to even harsher austerity terms. This in turn will increase the public's animosity towards his regime. He also came away from the US Congress empty-handed in he request for aid. Porky is caught between a rock and a hard place, and saving his own skin seems to be the main goal.

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Gift 3

Best of the Web: IMF carve-up of Ukraine: Putin may have 'taken' Crimea, but Western corporations took everything else

Ghada Chehade
Russia Insider
Sat, 21 Feb 2015 23:14 UTC
Putin
© Presidential Press and Information OfficePutin at the press conference following the Russian-Hungarian talks.
As the conflict in Ukraine persists and as peace talks between Putin and western European leaders (Merkel and Hollande) continue, it is important to look at the economic actors/interests that benefit from conflict and regime change in the Ukraine and how this compares to situations like Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are under-reported angles and interests to these conflicts that we hear little about in western mainstream media and that many do not look for because they are too caught up in political or human dramas. For instance, mainstream media spend so much time demonizing a single enemy, be it Putin in the Ukraine situation, Assad in Syria, Gaddafi in Libya or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, etc., that they do not also critically explore how external actors may exploit or bolster such conflicts and situations in order to secure politic-economic motives such as access to oil, making way for destructively conditional IMF loans, or quashing domestic policies that undermine foreign imperial and economic interests.

In western media, a dangerously false binary exists; wherein opposition to western imperial and corporate agendas for a particular region equals support for "evil men" like Putin or Gaddafi, for instance. This is part of what I call distraction politics or conflation politics, where opposition to neoliberal and imperial policies—such as IMF loans with austerity conditions that devastate and impoverish a nation, its people and its agriculture—is conflated with support for certain tyrants (as defined by the west).

Comment: Western propaganda is so backwards that it's brain damaging. For accurate information about what happened in Ukraine - and why - check out:

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Pumpkin 2

Deputy commander of NATO's forces in Europe: "Must prepare for Russian attack!"

Sam Jones
The Guardian
Fri, 20 Feb 2015 23:12 UTC
Adrian Bradshaw
© Ben Birchall/AFP/Getty ImagesBritish Commander Land Forces Lieutenant General Adrian Bradshaw, used very strong language to convince of the nonexistent Russian threat. Good job!
Russian expansionist ambitions could quickly become "an obvious existential threat to our whole being", the most senior British military officer in Nato has said in a strongly worded speech.

General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, appointed last year as Nato's deputy commander of forces in Europe, said the alliance needed to develop both fast-reacting conventional forces and capacities to counter Russian efforts at coercion and propaganda, as seen in Ukraine.

Talking of "an era of constant competition with Russia", Bradshaw told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute that Nato had to maintain a cohesive system of deterrence on its eastern borders, something that would require help from the EU.

He said Nato was pushing ahead with plans for a very high readiness joint taskforce, "in order to convince Russia, or any other state adversary, that any attack on one Nato member will inevitably lead them into a conflict with the whole alliance".

David Cameron has warned Vladimir Putin of "more consequences" if a ceasefire in Ukraine does not hold. Speaking on a visit to Govan shipyard in Glasgow on Friday, the prime minister said the responsibility for what had happened in Ukraine "lies absolutely squarely with Vladimir Putin and Russia", and a strong response was needed.


Comment: The neonazis in Kiev that the US, NATO and EE enthroned, are asking for lethal weapons to start "a full scale war", which throws the Minsk agreements into the garbage bin, and Cameron and Bradshaw, yet again, blame... Russia!?

Ukrainian deputy foreign minister claims Kiev preparing for 'full-scale' war


Comment: For a deputy commander of NATO's forces, he sounds very prone to paranoid ideation and easily terrorized by imaginary threats...

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Battery

Tesla: Bonfire of the money printers' vanities

David Stockman
ContraCorner
Sat, 21 Feb 2015 22:06 UTC
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© Reddit user s1lentway
The trouble with the money printing madness in the Eccles Building is that it generates huge deformations, misallocations and speculative excesses in the financial markets. Eventually these bubbles splatter, as they have twice this century. The resulting carnage, needless to say, is not small. Combined financial and real estate asset markdowns totaled about $7 trillion after the dotcom bust and $15 trillion during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Yes, the Fed has managed to reflate this cheap money bubble for the third time now, but the certainty that it will splatter once again is not the issue at hand. What gets lost in the serial bubble-making process of modern central banking is that vast real resources - labor, capital and materials - are misallocated owing to mispricing of stock, bonds and real estate during the bubble inflation phase.

Comment: Crony capitalism at its best no doubt.

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Brick Wall

The battle behind the fog of propaganda: The 'Exceptional' U.S. suffers crushing defeat in Debaltsevo

Mike Whitney
Information Clearing House
Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:18 UTC
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"There's no city left. It's destroyed."

— Anonymous Ukrainian soldier following the battle of Debaltsevo
In less than a year, the United States has toppled the democratically-elected government of Ukraine, installed a Washington-backed stooge in Kiev, launched a bloody and costly war of annihilation on Russian-speaking people in the East, thrust the economy into a downward death spiral, and reduced the nation to an anarchic, failed state destined to endure a vicious fratricidal civil war for as far as the eye can see.

Last week, Washington suffered its greatest military defeat in more than a decade when Ukraine's US-backed army was soundly routed in the major railway hub of Debaltsevo. Roughly, 8,000 Ukrainian regulars along with untold numbers of tanks and armored units were surrounded in what-came-to-be-known-as "the cauldron." The army of the Donetsk Peoples Republic led by DPR commander Alexander Zakharchenko, encircled the invading army and gradually tightened the cordon, eventually killing or capturing most of the troops within the pocket. The Ukrainian Armed Forces suffered major casualties ranging between 3,000 to 3,500 while a vast amount of lethal military hardware was left behind.

According to Zakharchenko, "The amount of equipment Ukrainian units have lost here is beyond description."

Comment: This is the picture of Washington's blind pursuit of its undeclared war on Russia.

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Bomb

Netanyahu after IAEA report: Iran's nuke program is 'hidden'


RT
Fri, 20 Feb 2015 18:47 UTC
netanyahu
© Reuters / Ronen Zvulun
A new IAEA report has sparked a war of words ahead of key Geneva negotiations, with Israel claiming it proves that Iran is "preparing for the production of nuclear weapons," and Tehran insisting that it shows its "transparency."

"The agency remains concerned about the possible existence in Iran of undisclosed nuclear-related activities involving military-related organizations, including activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile," said a copy of a confidential document compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency, obtained by the media in several countries late on Thursday.

Israel was more emphatic.

Comment: Next he'll say the Iranians have invisibility cloaks around their nuclear program. What the IAEA and the rest of the civilized world don't understand is that if Netanyahu says Iran has a nuclear weapons program, it does. How hard is that to understand? No need for evidence. Just take Bibi's word for it.

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